It happens at least once a year. During a class discussion, someone will ask me what I think of “social justice.”
I typically begin with a joke, quoting Gandhi’s purported reply when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.” And then, in a more serious vein, I ask the student what she or he thinks the term means.
That’s the oldest trick in the teacher playbook, of course: When you get a good question, turn it back on the class. But in this case, it’s also a pedagogical and even a moral imperative. Put simply, social justice has become a catch-all term that blinds us to different political and ideological conceptions of it. There’s nothing just about that.
Open up any college catalog these days, and you’ll see “social justice” in bright lights. Especially in the humanities and the professional schools, it routinely appears in course descriptions and syllabi. There are also a growing number of majors and minors devoted explicitly to the concept, including programs in “social justice studies” at Miami and Roosevelt Universities, “sociology and social justice” at Northland College and Kean University, and “social justice and social policy” at Brandeis.
It also figures largely in residential-life programming at institutions like the University of California at Los Angeles, where student “social justice advocates” were paid to conduct workshops on racism, homophobia, and other topics. The Social Justice Institute at Case Western offers grants to students to conduct “social justice research.” Meanwhile, faculty there can apply for up to $10,000 to fund research about social justice, and up to $2,500 for help in redesigning courses to build in social-justice components and perspectives.
All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives. For the most part, though, it doesn’t. Social justice is mostly presented as a series of taken-for-granted political propositions, including the centrality of race and gender in constructing inequality and the need for state intervention to overcome it.
I happen to agree with those propositions, but I also acknowledge that there are many decent and reasonable people who do not. They believe in social justice, too. They just have a different way of defining it.
How many courses on social justice teach that the term was coined by a conservative 19th-century Catholic theologian (yes, you read that right) who wanted to defend civil society from the intrusions of the modern nation-state? How many expose students to the libertarian Friedrich Hayek’s 1976 book The Mirage of Social Justice, which argued that the phrase was “nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone’”?
As the Brown University political philosopher John Tomasi has pointed out, Hayek actually invoked his own version of social justice. An economy based on free markets, he believed, would do a better job distributing more goods to more people than a regulated economy would. And when markets didn’t work well, Hayek said, governments should provide social services for needy families and even a guaranteed minimum income.
Open up any college catalog these days, and you’ll see ‘social justice’ in bright lights.
Calling Andrew Yang! The point here isn’t that Hayek (or Yang) are right, but that social justice is a vastly more complicated — and contested — concept than our universities typically acknowledge. But those differences rarely — if ever — appear in our coursework about the topic, where one set of viewpoints is privileged and the rest are denigrated or simply ignored.
And on the residence-life side — well, forget about any real dialogue or analysis about the term. As Sam Abrams, a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence, has documented, university administrators are even more left-leaning in their politics than our overwhelmingly liberal professoriate is. So they’re probably more likely to impose a singular conception of social justice, as well.
And woe to those rare souls who dissent from it. At the University of Minnesota, a residential adviser, Justine Schwarz, lost her job in 2017 in part for doing just that. “Justine has not demonstrated a commitment to social justice growth and promotion to residents,” her performance review declared. “When she engaged in discussions about [social justice], she often plays devil’s advocate.”
Message to everyone else: If you don’t like what’s being said about social justice, keep your big mouth shut. The fall 2016 training agenda for residential advisers at Minnesota included criticisms of Thanksgiving celebrations and support for the Women’s March on Washington to protest Donald Trump’s election. One can imagine any number of reasonable objections to a public university promoting a political demonstration. But you’re unlikely to hear them if we discourage people from questioning social justice in the first place.
Or consider programming and classwork about “microaggressions,” which The New York Times called “the social justice word du jour” back in 2014. It has only mushroomed since then, embraced everywhere from freshman orientations to faculty-development workshops. The idea is that members of minority groups suffer small verbal slights with large consequences to their psychological well-being, so we need to educate everyone about how to avoid offending terms and phrases.
There’s just one problem: The science behind the concept seems to be weak. As the Emory University psychologist Scott Lilienfeld has argued, in an exhaustive literature review, nobody has shown that the alleged targets of microaggressions consistently perceive them as insulting or that hearing these terms negatively impacts their mental health.
Shouldn’t that perspective be part of any social-justice class or exercise about microaggressions? Some people might take issue with Lilienfeld’s analysis, while others might argue that we should teach about microaggressions even in the absence of strong research supporting them. But everyone should at least be exposed to his perspective, so they can think more deeply about the concept and come to their own informed opinion of it.
Ironically, advocates for social justice often invoke the gospel of “critical thinking” as well. But they can’t have it both ways. If they really want to promote critical thought, they need to apply it to everything — including social justice. Anything less isn’t education; it’s indoctrination.
